Wise man understands that it is seldom, if ever wise to forecast what might wash over a waterfall when looking up from the bottom of it.

Basically Matt, there are a bunch of good people being as proactive as all hell, but when you're dealing with multi-million $$ contracts, with global providers, who also have to ensure they have the capacity to sell us at the time, it's a very wiggly snake to try and align in under 2 months.

At the same time, it might also turn out that it's not cost effective to augment international capacity, esp. when everyone wants more for less. Sometimes "Do nothing" is a very valid business decision.

And finally

THE INTERNET IS BEST EFFORTS!! No one guarantees anything will be available when you specifically want it. You could have 1Gb of bandwidth to WoW's doorstep but of there are 10,000 users all hammering on that 1Gb interface to the the World Wide Wait, then best pucker up, because you're getting 10Kb if you're lucky.

/rant off

"Customers don’t expect you to be perfect. They do expect you to fix things when they go wrong." Donald Porter – British Airways

The views expressed here are my own and are not reflective of other organisms or organisations.

Matt, I totally agree with you that TCL don't always get it right when lining the ducks up... but I agree with DV more...

Some times I think we need a bit of perspective.

A decade ago I was paying $2 for get a 2 hour phone call to Australia. A phone call used ~64kbits/s.

So, if we stack that up against DV's WoW example, for 2 hours WoW a night, I was paying $30 for a phone line and $60 a month for the 'calls'.... so $90.

However today, 10 years on, I can have 100mbit, 100GB and for $115, which when you consider inflation of that same time is way less than $90 a decade ago.

A 2 years ago I was paying $160 a month for 20Gb/10/2, a phone line and alarm monitoring.

Today I don't have a phone line, I have VoIP which gives me 2 calls at the same time, alarm monitoring over the net, 100GB/100/10... $130.

Little perspective... we're getting more and more value fast.

Everyone here knows I'm all about bashing the telco for some more consumer value... but even I have to accept that the guys making the big calls in places like Telecom and Telstra do have some real skill.

DV - the 'best effort' argument, while right, is crap. You're right, but I really think we have to keep pushing forward to a better than just 'best effort' Internet :)

It's amazing that something as two head as the internet, on one hand, a capitalist's wet dream in terms of reach, opportunity and marketsize and at the other, such a communist set of controls, understandings and intentions, it's truly a miracle that it has survived, thrived and evolved into something most of the developed world doesn't seem to be able to live without (or live with...).

If you look at it, no one nation controls it, POTUS would have you think otherwise, but BGP will always find a way around the USA or any other one nation that thinks they can control it/turn it off, even poison it.

Short of there being a backdoor into most TCP/IP implementations that acts as a dead mans switch, it's remarkably self healing.

To make any system more than best efforts, you need to be able to command, control or compel more than 50 percent of it's elements, or have a unique understanding of it's topological layout and have control of less of the total but more of the strategic elements. With the Global BGP ASN count sitting just over 41,000 advertising ~241,000 aggregated prefixes, that an AWFULLY large number of organisations to have to compel to behave in a given manner, such that the Internetwork runs in your favour. http://www.cidr-report.org/as2.0/

As the sticker might say "I can help you to the edge of my ranch, the neigbour next door isn't a bad bloke, but watch out for the indians over tht far hill"

"Customers don’t expect you to be perfect. They do expect you to fix things when they go wrong." Donald Porter – British Airways

The views expressed here are my own and are not reflective of other organisms or organisations.

I like to think I at least try to be as balanced as I can be and openly accept when I'm wrong.

I know I put a lot out there for discussion and am the first to admit that I don't always get it right, just like anyone else.

DoomlordVekk: It's amazing that something as two head as the internet, on one hand, a capitalist's wet dream in terms of reach, opportunity and marketsize and at the other, such a communist set of controls, understandings and intentions, it's truly a miracle that it has survived, thrived and evolved into something most of the developed world doesn't seem to be able to live without (or live with...).

Personally, I think everything about computing and technology is little more than 'best effort'.

When we consider what you've said above, you're right, it is just amazing that a 'bit', let alone a byte or packet, can make it to just about everywhere in the world today.

I agree with your comments.

I remember when phone calls to Auckland used to have echo and you had to almost shout.

Today a phone call is echo free, yet in my case, to call next door, my call goes to Auckland over Telstra IP, hands over to 2Talk as IP, is then handed to Telecom in some way, heads back to Christchurch, goes to a local exchange, is converted to analogue, travels 500m on 60 year old copper and 'just works'.

But it's taken 100 years to get phones to work around the whole planet and decades to get the echo out.

I agree with you, it's amazing what we've managed so far.

In saying that we have to do better, that's not the selfish consumer that always wants more, it's the tech guy who spends hours figuring how to make stuff work and then just wants to make it work better.

So according to the TrueNet report, TCL cable customers can get over 18Mbps speed during the day?

i think it's more like 17 megabit. apparently telstraclear boosted it slightly at one point. the truenet report judges max speed slightly different for cable than for adsl.

for adsl they say the maximum speed you get, for cable they use a fixed point of 15 megabit. also, with the way cable works there tends be a bit of burst speed higher too - like your connection may be able to go up to 20 or more megabit, but they rate limit the speed through, but the first few packets will go at the full speed. so on small files, there can be a bit of extra speed. this can also mean that some rate estimates of the connection can overestimate the link speed leading to a higher chance of sending data too fast until there is packet loss.

afaik the same kind of thing will be happening with ufb with rate limits where the speed can seem higher for a period, as again the access medium is faster.

it is possible for equipment to drip feed in at a slower speed in between in a more constant manner, but that doesn't tend to be common.

These DNS addresses are provided by Telstra Clear tot the ADSL modem on connecting but it does not help with the performance. Currently 1.09 mbps down and .59 mbps up. This is after buying a new ADSL modem today, TP-Link TD-W8960N as recomended by feedback here.

The performance of the Telstra ADSL is so low that I can't stream basic video from a web site. This was never an issue with the Xtra account that I had before changing to Telstra Clear.

Warricka: These DNS addresses are provided by Telstra Clear tot the ADSL modem on connecting but it does not help with the performance. Currently 1.09 mbps down and .59 mbps up. This is after buying a new ADSL modem today, TP-Link TD-W8960N as recomended by feedback here.

The performance of the Telstra ADSL is so low that I can't stream basic video from a web site. This was never an issue with the Xtra account that I had before changing to Telstra Clear.

There are many areas of the country experiencing exceptionally poor TelstraClear DSL performance at present, particularly the Bay of Plenty region. The solution (as several other people on here have posted about in the past week) is to simply change ISP's.